I think there is a danger there of being mean to people and humiliating people and embarrassing people just because it might get you ratings. It is a disturbing trend. —Bruce Nash
The only habit of allowing trolls to be mean, especially to women, whenever and where ever they want has gotten out of control. It’s time to stop them.
“Stop being mean!”
That is the Tipster’s response when I put her to bed for the third time. In her six-year-old world, having an 8:00 bedtime is mean; the sun isn’t quite down yet, there’s still daylight, so she thinks she still has time to play. We have boundaries and schedules I am obligated to enforce for her own good, so therefore, in her mind, I’m the mean one.
Raising a little girl in today’s environment. I want her to be as independent and strong as her mother and she shows every sign of having all those qualities. Grandpa Bob tells me Kat didn’t like going to bed, either. Yet, when I look at the world into which she’s growing up, one that demeans and ridicules women just for being women, I worry. A lot. I think I have plenty of good reasons.
Earlier this week, it was revealed that one of the nation’s top software engineers, Jessie Frazelle, received so many death and rape threats that her employer had to hire bodyguards to guarantee her safety. She recently moved to another company and while she has yet to make any kind of statement the general consensus is that she was harassed out the door, that the company knew about the harassment and did nothing to stop it. Last July she wrote:
Ever since I started speaking at conferences and contributing to open source projects I have been endlessly harassed. I’ve gotten hundreds of private messages on IRC and emails about sex, rape, and death threats. People emailing me saying they jerked off to my conference talk video (you’re welcome btw) is mild in comparison to sending Photoshopped pictures of me covered in blood.
Then, earlier this week, Frazelle tweeted:
I lost something I loved so much and a small piece of my soul standing up for myself, and I just don’t know if it was worth it.
— jessie frazelle (@jessfraz) April 22, 2016
I wish I could say this was an isolated problem. I wish I could say this was a new problem. Neither of those statements would be true, though. Being mean to women online is as old as the Internet itself and the toll it is exacting is severe.
The same day that the Frazelle story was posted, The Washington Post ran a story questioning whether 31-year-old Fairfax County firefighter Nicole Mittendorff was harassed so severely that she committed suicide last week. What makes this story particularly upsetting is that the trolls who have continued to hound her claim to be her fellow firefighters. An investigation is underway, but no matter what they find, and it’s almost certain that someone will be charged in this case, the fact that nothing was done to stop the continual barrage of mean comments, that no one was able to sufficiently stand up for her and back the trolls down, incriminates the entire online system.
Being mean, especially to women, has reached epidemic proportions. While this is just observational speculation, I’m willing to be that one could ask any woman with an internet account if they’ve had someone they don’t know say something mean about them online and probably 9 of every ten, if not more, would say yes. I know Kat’s gotten comments, especially when we first started seeing each other. She was able to handle those quickly, though. Not everyone is so lucky.
We laugh when Tonight Show host Jimmy Kimmel has guests read mean tweets about themselves but the very fact we find those tweets and other similar comments funny is a part of what allows the online abuse of women to flourish. Part of the reason trolls say the mean things they say is because they think what they’re doing is absolutely hilarious and that if we don’t “get it” that we need to “lighten up.” There is no humor in threatening to rape or kill women, though. It’s not funny to send them pictures covered in what appears to be blood. There’s no joke behind telling women they asked for it. Every last bit of it is mean.
#MoreThanMean started trending on Twitter yesterday after a Washington Post video was posted where two sports reporters, Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro, sat down and had sports fans read, out loud, some of the mean tweets the two women receive every day. The effect was emotional and drove home just how easy it is to type things that we never would consider saying to someone in person. The men reading the tweets were clearly uncomfortable and some even cried. You not only need to see this video, you need to share this video. Take a look:
Stop and think. Mother’s Day is coming up in a couple of weeks. Would you talk to your mother like that? Would you tolerate someone talking to your sister, your girlfriend, or your spouse with those words? Not if you have an ounce of decency in you, you wouldn’t. Those of you who have daughters, what if someone spoke like that to her?
Being mean has become so much a part of our culture, though, to the point that we have justified it and built organizations around it, and now embodied it in one of our leading presidential candidates. In a follow-up story on the boycotts we mentioned last week, a new article from Business Insider shows just how much hate and meanness there is around letting transgender people use the restroom with which they most identify. People of color have been beaten at presidential campaign rallies and the candidate has encouraged such mean behavior.
We have created a culture of mean and tolerated it far too long. The time has come for us to stand up, to confront the online bullies, especially those who harass women. We don’t have to necessarily be mean in response to meanness. I think responding with, “If you wouldn’t say it, don’t type it,” is a good start. And yes, unfortunately, there are people who are willing to say mean things. One of them is inexplicably running for president and appears to be winning his party’s nomination. Are we really willing to allow the election of a president who is mean?
This is the primary reason we don’t allow comments on these pages. We tried it a few years ago and even then the mean and rude comments were enough of a problem I made the decision to simply not provide a forum where such statements could exist. I am still of the mind that unmoderated comments are unnecessary and unhelpful.
#MoreThanMean needs to become a battle cry. We cannot allow this culture of mean to continue. Lives are at stake. The lives of people we all hold dear, even if they’re not old enough to be online yet. For all the Tipsters and the Ravens and the Emmas and every other little girl out there who are not yet able to speak for themselves, we need to shut this culture of mean down now.
If you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face, don’t type it. And confront those who do.
Time To Ditch The Cruelty
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity. —George Eliot
We need more smiles. We need more niceness. We need less cruelty.
I started yesterday in one of those foul moods where I’m pretty sure my verbal cruelty had Kat more than happy to be spending the day at the salon. I hate those days, but yesterday rather snuck up on me as a confluence of circumstance combined with continual interference from an unwanted external source made the situation intolerable. While I would like to excuse the behavior as just being human, I can’t. I know better. I caved to those basest and vile instincts that might have had their place some 40,000 years ago but are wholly inappropriate now.
Sadder still, I’m far from being the only one who has had issues with cruelty of late. We have come to expect cruelty in a presidential election year, I suppose, but that still doesn’t make the comments against women, minorities, immigrants, or other candidates’ family members any more appropriate. One of the first things I saw in my newsfeed this morning was a click-bait article (I’ll not bother you with the link) recounting the 17 worst assassination attempts on President Obama. And the whole still-developing mess from the Panama Papers threatens to unleash a whole new wave of international outrage toward anyone whose offshore dealings come off as shady. Given the current inference of bad guys mixing with heads of state, one might expect the next couple of weeks to be a bit tense at best.
I worry that cruelty has become our second nature. Someone says something we don’t like, we want to punch them. Someone represents something we oppose, we want to redistribute their body parts. Someone cuts us off in traffic, we’re immediately homicidal. We don’t want to take time to talk and understand each other’s point of view, we don’t want to take into consideration a different perspective. We don’t want to negotiate a peaceful outcome. We want full and complete destruction and will go to whatever means necessary to satisfy our blood lust.
This is the world we have created. We cannot blame our bent toward cruelty on previous generations. We did not learn this through bad parenting. We did not get here by failing to get the right trophy when we were in grade school. This is the result of a conscious and deliberate decision to not stop ourselves at that first moment of anger or disappointment. We could have just as easily shut ourselves down and done the right thing, but we decided, both collectively and individually, to let the anger push us forward.
As a result, we no longer even notice when five are killed in Pittsburg, or Kansas City, or Glendale. When an Uber driver goes nuts and kills six in Kalamazoo, we’re momentarily upset because children were involved, but then we go right back to exactly the same things we were doing the moment before. We’ve resigned ourselves to the notion that this is just the way things are and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
I call bullshit.
I can do something about my attitude and my response to everything that happens to and around me. How I respond, in turn, effects how others around me respond and their response impacts others beyond my reach. Every last one of us can improve the world simply by changing our own response and not letting anger and cruelty take over. We are in control and just as my grousing and cursing made yesterday difficult for everyone, I can just as easily make this morning better by saying thank you, speaking softly, and maybe even hand delivering a kiss or two where appropriate.
You can do the same. I know you can. You can smile, even though the weather this morning leaves something to be desired. You can choose a quiet, positive-toned response when someone approaches you with unjustified anger. You can stick up for someone who’s being treated unfairly. You can earnestly try to understand someone else’s point of view, even though you disagree with their position on the matter. You can step back, count to ten, or maybe even walk away from a situation rather than losing your temper.
We can all do a lot to change this pattern of cruelty that we’ve allowed to permeate our society. After all, we were the ones who let the situation get out of control in the first place. Politicians don’t make America or anywhere else great, people do. Let this be your #MondayMotivation to start making the world more friendly. We can do it.
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